Peanut

In 1985, I was given a PCjr as a graduation gift to help me through college. This was primarily because it was much more affordable than an Apple II, Mac or a regular PC. For the first year of college, I still used my trusty Sinclair quite a bit since I could do magic with it and hadn't yet gotten comfortable with the new level of complexity that the PC was. I remember realizing that I almost completely knew my Sinclair (I would realize later that there was still quite a bit I didn't knwo). The PC was clearly far more involved; at least in the hardware and operating system. Initially, all I cared about was that the BASIC was quite lacking, although it did have more capability, but that was just because the PC had more power than my Sinclair.

It took me a while to realize the problem of owning a PCjr. It didn't really matter for a while until my needs grew. By 1988, I was needing more to finish my final years in Aerospace Engineering. In the summer of 1988, I wrote a BASIC program on my PCjr to make the summer job I had much easier. Easy to do when you've got lots of spare time when you're young. At some point, I just took my whole system to work, set it up at my desk and began keying in new data as it came in and entering existing data when I had nothing else to do. It worked great. So great that I was able to sell the program to the company along with my entire computer system before I went back to school. I used the money to help buy a new computer - a regular PC. I had managed to get out from under a PCjr for not much less than it cost and then some for the software, which they ran for about another 10 years. Before that, I was certain that I'd be stuck with the PCjr lemon, unable to get rid of it. I just had to find the right job for it.

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